This week Bri, Hailey and I worked super hard on our mapping project. We have our presentations on Tuesday and I am a little bit nervous but excited about presenting our two buildings and our walk. We did the walk two times starting from The Pirelli Tower and finishing at the Casa Galimberti building. The Pirelli Skyscraper was constructed from 1956-1960 and Gio Ponti was the architect. The Architectural style is modernism and was originally built in the area where the Pirelli Companies first factory was located in the nineteenth century. This week we actually got to visit the Pirelli building with the entire class and go inside of it. One interesting fact about the Pirelli Skyscraper is that in 2002 a small airplane crashed into it, causing the building to close down until 2003. Our second building was Casa Galimberti constructed from 1903-1905, we also saw this building as a class during our first week in Milan. The architect of this building is Giovanni Battista Bossi and the constructors of the building were the Galimberti brothers. The Architectural type of this building is Art Nouveau or liberty style. Before I did the first walk between our buildings I was pretty sure that since our first building was a modern building and our second building was liberty style, the walk between would follow the same trend. I thought that the neighborhood around the Pirelli building would be very modern and as we moved further and further away from it and closer to the liberty style Casa Galimberti the neighborhoods were going to get older and have more of a traditional post World War II feel. I was very wrong to think that the walk from my two assigned buildings was going to have such a smooth transition in neighborhoods from modern to liberty style. Although the initial area where the Pirelli building is located at is very modern, a two minute walk in the direction of the Casa Galimberti building leaves us in a old post war neighborhood that is anything but modern. This area has many small local owned businesses such as, Asian markets and restaurants, massage places, two small churches and hole in the wall restaurants. About fifteen minutes into our walk, and five minutes away from the Casa Galimberti building we were once again surprised when we hit a main street. This street was extremely modern featuring many stores such as Nike and Zara. As we turned the corner away from the main street we were once again confronted by small shops, and a minute later we were standing by Casa Galimberti. Our walk had many different flavors to it, it was not one smooth transition from the new to the old. From this walk I learned how beautifully Milan is able to incorporate the old and the new, different cultures and different backgrounds in such a small space.
Although I had many ideas about the theme for my sketchbook, for the past two weeks I narrowed down my interests and decided to focus on graffiti. This week I was able to organize the pictures of graffiti I have been taking and realized that most of the very intricate graffiti pieces that I’ve captured have been along the walls of train stations. These graffiti tags are usually playful and full of color, often featuring animals. While looking at my pictures, I noticed that I had taken a lot of random pictures of words tagged on sides of buildings both in Milan and in Venice. I wanted to dismiss these tags as a form of useless graffiti, but the more I looked at the pictures, the more I realized a common trend. In Milan, words tagged on the walls of buildings were usually written in Italian. I looked up some of them and they seemed to just be random words that might be a symbol for a certain gang. However, in Venice most of the graffiti words tagged on walls of buildings were written in English. These tags contained powerful words such as “no more visitors” and “wake up Italy”. To me these tags are not just useless graffiti done by untalented kids wanting to vandalize, but they are done by youth, using powerful words, to show their discontent with a range of issues such as government and tourism.
For my third weekend I decided to stay in Milan and explore the city. Not only did I get most of my shopping done for my family, I also discovered my favorite stores in Milan. The two stores that I will be dreaming about once I get back to the United States would have to be the Design Supermarket by the Dumo and Tiger. This weekend I have gone to the Design Supermarket twice and I still don’t feel like I have spent enough time in there, especially after my newfound love for Alessi. So far I have bought an Alessi teakettle, some espresso cup sets for my friends and family and the famous Castiglioni spoons with the square handle. It has been so fun to study all these designers and actually be able to see their work in stores around Milan. I found it so amazing that the store employees talked about each piece that they had in their store with so much care. I asked one of the sales ladies if she could help me find the Castiglioni spoons for coffee, not only did she know exactly where they were, she proceeded to tell me how Castiglioni came up with the playful design. It seems like everyone I talk to know so much about Italian design.